Isaac Julien: I Dream a World
April 12–July 13, 2025
Artist Retrospective
Curated by Claudia Schmuckli, Holly Johnson and Parker Harris.
Image: Isaac Julien. Installation View of Baltimore, 2003 feat. Melvin Van Peebles. de Young Museum, San Francisco.
de Young Museum
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
San Francisco, CA 94118
+1-415-750-3600
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de Young Museum Hours
| Monday | Closed |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | 9:30 am – 5:15 pm |
| Wednesday | 9:30 am – 5:15 pm |
| Thursday | 9:30 am – 5:15 pm |
| Friday | 9:30 am – 5:15 pm |
| Saturday | 9:30 am – 5:15 pm |
| Sunday | 9:30 am – 5:15 pm |
Overview
When I think about the future of technology, my mind often goes to the darkest of places, imagining a post-apocalyptic world ruled by android oligarchs built upon the backs of human labor.
Yet if we rewind 150 years, motion pictures were once hailed as the cutting edge of visual innovation. Fast forward to 2025, and video dominates our cultural landscape: YouTube reigns supreme, the crown jewel of youth ambition.
It’s in this context that Isaac Julien’s work feels so resonant. His exhibition, Isaac Julien: I Dream a World—on view at the de Young Museum through July 13, 2025, and the subject of this post on A LOVE LETTER TO ART—takes both its name and inspiration from the Langston Hughes poem. Julien’s dream world is a heightened sensory environment—where sound and color work simultaneously to trigger the many sides of beauty, fear, anger, hope, and curiosity.
I dream a world where all / Will know sweet freedom’s way, / Where greed no longer saps the soul / Nor avarice blights our day. / A world I dream where black or white, / Whatever race you be, / Will share the bounties of the earth / And every man is free, / Where wretchedness will hang its head / And joy, like a pearl, / Attends the needs of all mankind— / Of such I dream, my world!
—Langston Hughes, I Dream a World
Isaac Julien Recites “I Dream a World” by Langston Hughes. de Young Museum. San Francisco.
Since the 1980s, Julien has approached the moving image not merely as a medium, but as a poetic space for exploring history, identity, and power. His immersive, cinematic installations anticipate many of the questions shaping our current visual and political culture, making his practice as vital now as it has ever been.
The show features ten major video installations filmed across Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and the Americas between 1999 and 2022, and is curated by FAMSF’s Claudia Schmuckli, Holly Johnson, and Parker Harris.
Clip from Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves, 2010. de Young Museum, San Francisco.
Upon entering the museum’s main hall (Wilsey Court), you are greeted by Ten Thousand Waves, a work that “commemorates the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, in which more than 20 Chinese cockle pickers drowned on a flooded sandbank off the coast of northwest England. Julien interweaves contemporary Chinese culture with ancient myth—including the legend of the sea goddess Mazu (portrayed by Maggie Cheung), whose story originates in Fujian Province, the home region of the Morecambe Bay workers.”
Clip from Isaac Julien’s Once Again…Statues Never Dies, 2022. de Young Museum, San Francisco.
The exhibition opens with Once Again…Statues Never Die, “a five-screen installation commissioned by Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation (one of my FAVORITE museums) for its centennial.
Drawing on extensive archival research, the film stages a fictional dialogue between art collector and philanthropist Albert C. Barnes, who created the Barnes in 1922, and Alain Locke, a philosopher and an art critic who was dubbed ‘Father of the Harlem Renaissance.’ Once Again… (Statues Never Die) reflects Isaac Julien’s broader intent to engage critical conversations about the African material culture that influenced Black cultural movements. While primarily organized around Locke’s critical consideration of the Barnes collection, the film also features a Black woman curator moving among an ethnographic collection, alluding to contemporary debates on the restitution of looted African objects.
According to the late critic and scholar bell hooks, Julien’s work intends to decolonize Black imagination and push back against the white-supremacist narrative that Black people ‘could not understand aesthetics, could not create beauty or theorize about its substance’ because of an alleged lack of emotional intelligence. Toward the film’s end, Julien gives form to hooks’s sentiment in a poetic shot of Locke standing with his eyes closed, head tilted, reveling in the softness of an evening snowfall.”
Clip from Isaac Julien’s Baltimore, 2022 feat. the late Melvin Van Peebles. de Young Museum, San Francisco.
Baltimore is my FAVORITE work in the show. The 12 minute short is a sci-fi neo-noir gem, and a stunning homage to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s.
“Coming on the heels of Baadasssss Cinema (which you can watch FREE HERE), Isaac Julien’s 2002 documentary on the relevance and reach of blaxploitation films in Hollywood, Baltimore is an impressionist adaptation of the genre into a sci-fi fantasy.
It stars actor and filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, whose 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassses Song (WATCH ON AMAZON HERE) was credited for inaugurating the blaxploitation genre, and performer Vanessa Myrie as a mysterious woman endowed with supernatural powers. Baltimore marks the first apparition of Myrie, whose presence-as an angel, muse, ghost, or witness-pervades many of Julien’s subsequent films.
Van Peebles takes the viewer on a tour of three of the city’s cultural institutions after dark: the Walters Art Museum, the George Peabody Library, and the Great Blacks in Wax Museum. His movement from the streets of Baltimore to the internal space of the museum mirrors, and provides an opportunity to reflect on, the process of institutionalization: who gets to be commemorated in museums and how?
By staging a confrontation between Van Peebles and his wax double in the Walters, Julien manifests his intention to reframe and reposition Blackness within the museum. Removing wax effigies of Black icons from the wax museum and placing them in the European paintings galleries of the Walters, Julien opens up a critical dialogue between classical and popular culture. Baltimore also reads as a critique of the gendered stereotypes that fueled blaxploitation films, as Van Peebles’s authority appears challenged by the cyber character played by Myrie.”
As video continues to shape the way we consume and share content, I expect museums and cultural institutions to leverage this accessible and relatable form of contemporary art to an even greater extent.
I’ve seen an extraordinary range of video installations over the past few years—from Nam June Paik at SFMOMA (2021) to Pipilotti Rist at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (2022), Richard Mosse’s Broken Spectre at Minnesota Street Project (2023), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer at Gray Area (2023), and Mika Rottenberg at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (2023). Now, I can add Isaac Julien: I Dream a World to that list.
It’s a FANTASTIC show—more like a film festival, really—where you get to experience ten fabulous art films in a single museum visit. Don’t miss it!
🗓 Isaac Julien: I Dream a World is on view until July 13, 2025 at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.
It runs alongside some wonderful shows (see below), including Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm (post to follow soon); About Place: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift; and Leilah Babirye: We Have a History.
✨ Also check out the PHENOMENAL Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art exhibition (post to follow soon), which closes on Aug 7, 2025 at FAMSF’s Legion of Honor.
- Isaac Julien: I Dream a World (Video exhibition featuring 10 of Julien’s major works.) | Closes July 13, 2025
- Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm (Features 250+ personal photographs by Paul McCartney, along with video clips and archival materials chronicling the Beatles’ lives from ’63-’64. Post to follow soon.) | Closes Oct. 5, 2025
- Matisse’s Jazz Unbound (Features 20 prints from Matisse’s iconic artist book Jazz.) | Closes July 27, 2025
- About Place: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift (42 works by 30+ local artists. Includes excellent selections by Clare Rojas, Rupy C. Tut, and Chelsea Ryoko Wong.) | Closes July 5, 2025
- Leilah Babirye: We Have a History (AMAZING AMAZING SHOW by the Ugandan artist, dramatically installed in the museum’s Art of Africa wing.) | Closes Oct 26, 2025
- Contemporary Painting in Papua New Guinea: Mathias Kauage and His Family (Four extraordinary paintings by Mathias Kauage from the museum’s private collection—on view for the first time—reveal the bold and expressive vision of one of Papua New Guinea’s most celebrated artists.) | Closes March 15, 2026
⭐ ADMISSION:
- General Admission Adults $20 (includes same-day GA entry to Legion of Honor Museum)
- Seniors 65+ $17
- Students (w/ID) $11
- 17 & Under FREE.
- *SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS +$15 (Includes access to permanent collections)
- **Membership (includes Legion of Honor Museum) starts at $129
- Free Satudays for Bay Area Residents (w/ID or postmarked envelope)
- Free First Tuesdays of the Month
- Discover and Go (Free w/library card—may not apply to all counties)
- SF Museums for All (show your EBT or Medi-Cal card/ID)
- Public Transportation Discount (receive a $2 discount w/proof of receipt)
- Free Admission to all exhibitions w/Sotheby’s Preferred Membership.
- *THE PERMANENT COLLECTION IS FREE TO VISIT AT 4:30 p.m.
- FREE Summer Artisan Fair in Wilsey Court (museum’s main hall) on Fri, July 18 and Sat, July 19 from 9:30 a.m.–5:15 p.m. Features 11 artists: Firdose Ahmad Jan, Spain in America, Cuong Ta, Pretty Soap Co, Roxane Hume, Turning Leaf Handmade, Carly Waters, Clouds + Ladders, Judy Brandon, Sarah Jane Hassler, Zina Kao. *Members receive a 10% discount.
- Docent Tour for Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm runs Tuesday–Sunday 12:30 p.m.
- Compelling Gallery Conversations runs Saturdays 12:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. and First Tuesdays 10:30 a.m.
- Sketching in the Galleries on select Saturdays from 11:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.
- Family Tour on select Saturdays 10:30 a.m.; Next one is July 19.
- Family Art Making on select Saturdays from 11:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m; Next one is July 5 in the Kimball Education Gallery (inspired by Matisse’s Jazz Unbound).
- Rose B. Simpson: LEXICON (El Caminos meet Pueblo pottery—can’t wait!) | Aug 30, 2025–Aug 2, 2026
- Art of Manga (Exhibition featuring 700+ drawings chronicling the history of manga.) | Sept 7, 2025–Jan 25, 2026
- Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art (Thiebaud retrospective with 60+ works from his 7+ decade career. Post to follow soon.) | Closes Aug 7, 2025
- Celebrating 100 Years at the Legion of Honor (Commemorative exhibition honoring the museum’s centennial.) | Closes Nov 2, 2025
- Printing Color: Chiaroscuro to Screenprint (Explores the evolution of color in printmaking from the Renaissance to today.) | Closes Jan 4, 2026
Currently on View at FAMSF’s de Young Museum
Coming Soon to FAMSF’s de Young Museum
Currently on View at FAMSF’s Legion of Honor
Coming Soon to FAMSF’s Legion of Honor
A LOVE LETTER TO ART RECOMMENDS
RELATED VIDEOS
A Conversation with Isaac Julien. de Young Museum, San Francisco.
Behind the Scenes with Isaac Julien: Creating Ten Thousand Waves. MoMA, New York.
RELATED POSTS
Author: ALoveLettertoArt
